the cole family blarg

We have been looking for some time to purchase a second flatscreen TV. I struggled to come up with an ideal setup that would integrate into our already well developed MythTV infrastructure (digital HDTV recordings already working well via firewire [w/commercial flagging] on the backend)

I had a few options to choose from:

• $1100 - Motorola DCT 6200+ 30″ LCD TV - The most basic setup. Requires no integration into anything. Kind of expensive, no ability to watch recordings that have been so carefully setup.
• $700 - Mac Mini + 30″ LCD TV - I have an old Mac Mini (1.4GHz PPC) lying around that could be used as a underpowered frontend for watching TV. The machine is way too slow to watch HD on however. Requires a very ugly ethernet cable strung around the place to hook into the network due to lack of wireless.
• $1800 - iMac 24″ - By far the most expensive option, this has a number of great benefits. A beautiful 1920×1200 display that can playback HD recordings from MythTV. No external box required. Add in a bluetooth keyboard and mouse and the only cable remaining is the power and amplified speakers.

After a lot of thinking, we went with the iMac. After a week of using it, I am very glad I went that route. This thing is a great computer and a great TV. The Apple Remote even works in MythTV! The setup is very elegant and free of clutter. The computer itself has quickly become the most popular machine in the house!

It took a bit of tweaking to get the HD playback working at 1900×1080p - there are a lot more settings in MythTV 0.21 than with 0.20, and I had to do a lot of experimentation to find a filter that would playback the stream in realtime. (I ended up with opengl + Kernel HW in my setup)

In other news, my Windows machine has been banished to the basement. Any correlation?

If you are going to write a program that references OpenGL, chances are you will be using C or C++ to do so.

There are however lots of cool bindings to the GL library through more modern languages such as Python, Java, C#, and Ruby.

I wrote a decently complex Tetris clone in .NET/GL using a rather unpolished binding. Garbage collection proves interesting, as disposing of an object did not actually free the memory used by its GL objects. Having to manually create deconstructors worked, but is totally against how things are supposed to be done.

I am dabbling in Ruby + OpenGL now as I feel that it creates a lot of opportunity for me to apply in a lot of ways. I can use Ruby on Rails for web development, and carry the same syntax over to GL development. I have no idea whether the Ruby-OpenGL binding will actually do proper garbage collection, but here’s hoping.

A 13-month old in action!

At the beginning of each year, a bunch of media types get together and proclaim that year XXXX is the year of Desktop Linux. So far they have been wrong everytime as Linux on the desktop has been very awkward and falls short in many areas.

I can say however that in 2008, running Ubuntu Linux 7.10 with compiz enabled - the future is a lot brighter than it has been in the past. The installation from LiveCD, excellent package management and stable environment make for a good user experience. I installed it on my HP 6910p laptop, and virtually all of my devices worked perfectly out of the box. Even sleep/hibernate functions work correctly for the first time that I’ve ever seen. The only system component I had to install the ATi restricted driver, because the open source driver is weak at this time (promising to get better with ATi providing documentation to the community).

The OpenGL enhanced desktop with compiz is excellent. They really did a good job in focusing on making the eye candy useful (contrast to Flip3D in Windows Vista).

Overall I am quite pleased. I give the whole thing an 8/10.